“It is
by being blind to non‑performance‑related
criteria that we teach tolerance, not by pretending that such things do
not
matter, while at the same time taking them into account during hiring.”

Among
this year’s federal government award winners for employment equity
are the University of British
Columbia and University of Windsor.
These awards provide an occasion, not only to recognize diversity in
the workplace, but also to ask whether there is a need for
government‑mandated
employment equity programs in Canadian universities today.

Like
American
affirmative action programs, Canadian employment equity programs have
been
contentious. Many Canadians believe that they are well‑intentioned but
ineffective, that they do little to change discriminatory practices or
to
improve the lives of those affected by discrimination. Others believe
that
these programs take advantage of people’s natural sympathy for victims
of
discrimination in order to add layers of unnecessary bureaucracy and to
institute an unwelcome ideological agenda. As a result, there is
widespread
agreement among advocates and critics of employment equity alike that
current
legislation is both cumbersome and inefficient.

How did we arrive at
such a regrettable situation?

Most such programs are
based on several competing objectives. These include redressing past
discrimination, minimizing conditions of disadvantage (whether these
conditions
result from discrimination or not), and promoting so‑called “preferred
employment ratios” between designated groups and the population as a
whole.

The
difficulty with
such incompatible objectives is that no single program is capable of
addressing
them all. Promoting preferred employment ratios, for example, will not
help
redress past discrimination. Similarly, while allowing criteria other
than merit
to favour some job applicants, no employer can act in a completely
nondiscriminatory manner. It is this type of inconsistency which gives
most
employment equity policies their air of disingenuousness.

How
can this tension be
resolved?

Modern
democracy has as its basic aim the free,
unencumbered participation of citizens in the political, economic and
social
arrangements of society. By attempting to guarantee that people have
the right
to participate in the activities of their choosing, regardless of
factors such
as race, national origin, gender, religion, or sexual orientation, our
liberal‑democratic
institutions have regularly served as the means by which we are able to
achieve
this ideal.

Even so, many traditionalists remain sceptical
about such blanket liberties. For example, some would prefer not to
have gays
and lesbians teaching in school classrooms, arguing that they provide
inappropriate role models for students. Conversely, some advocates of
employment equity believe that alternative sexual preference should
count as a
positive (rather than negative) consideration in hiring. They maintain
that by
exposing students to a variety of lifestyles at an early age, children
will
become more accepting of differences.

Neither view is
correct. Anyone who wishes to teach tolerance should oppose this second
view as
well as the first. Just as it is inappropriate not to hire on the basis
of
criteria that aren’t related to performance, it is also wrong to hire
on such a
basis, and for exactly the same reason. It is by being blind to
non‑performance‑related
criteria that we teach tolerance, not by pretending that such things do
not
matter, while at the same time taking them into account during hiring.
As the
famous Athenian democrat Pericles expressed it some 2,500 years ago,
“When it
is a question of putting one person before another in positions of
public
responsibility, what counts is not membership of a particular class,
but the
actual ability which each possesses.”

If Pericles is right,
participation rates are not something that can be appropriately
legislated.
Democracy is not a guarantee that everyone will have the same
preferences, or
want to make the same choices. Democracy is not a guarantee of
uniformity. It
is just the opposite.

The claim that
unwarranted discrimination is the only explanation for the low
participation
rates of some groups in some economic sectors is thus unfounded. To
believe, as
many advocates of employment equity apparently do, that outcomes,
rather than
non-discriminatory structures, are something to be socially engineered
is to
misconstrue democracy at its most fundamental level. As the British
philosopher
Isaiah Berlin put it, “To manipulate men, to propel them towards goals
which
you—the social reformers—see, but they may not, is to deny their human
essence,
to treat them as objects without wills of their own, and therefore to
degrade
them.”

If we want to prevent
discrimination, numerical targets or goals—as required by most
employment
equity programs—will be of little help. Setting such targets will
require
discovering the composition of qualified applicant pools over several
generations, something which typically requires the use of
unrecoverable
statistical data. Similarly, voluntary identification using often
largely
subjective criteria such as race inevitably leads to unreliable data.
Social
policy based on such data leads, not only to difficulties concerning
justice,
but to practical difficulties as well.

What we should be
attempting to guarantee instead is equality of opportunity. It is only
by
recognizing that this is not the same as equality of representation,
and that
participation rates are not something to be legislated, that truly
nondiscriminatory hiring policies will be brought about.

Andrew
Irvine
teaches
in the Department of Philosophy at the University of British
Columbia.